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need help with Viper V550

Bought Viper V550 two weeks ago and cant get it to work. I have PII 300 with 128 meg EDO on pc100 M729 mainboard from pc chips. Currently using SIS 6326 card that came with system, works fine. When I install viper, monitor says"Please check signal cable." Diamond and pc chips are not responding. If any body has any ideas, PLEASE HELP!!!!

To:Chanse
I wish it were that simple. The monitor cable works fine with my current card(both 15 pin adapters). As for the video connector on the card, that was my first thought also, but: I returned the first viper V550 I had bought thinking it was a defective video connector. The vendor I purchased it from sent me a new one with a note stating that the one I returned had worked fine, so it must be something else. BIOS? who knows. Any other ideas? Anybody?

Your mother board is probably not electrically compatible with the tnt based v550. The riva tnt cards use higher current than alot of agp ports on boards can put out. You should check into this with the place who sold you your mother board. Im assuming you tried the second card to no avail?

To:collinj
Yes, I tried both cards and they both say "Please check signal cable". What do you mean by electrically compatible? agp is not agp between manufacturers? If this is true, what would be a compatible motherboard for a Viper v550? Thanks.

The pcchips board you are using does not use an intel bx chipset on the motherboard. The board is probably not compatable with the viper v550. I know, you are thinking its an agp card, it should work in any board with an agp port, but this is not true. The older lx chipset boards from alot of manufacturers will not run the new cards such as the viper v550. One example of this is from one of the top motherboard manufaturers. Asus's P2L97 i440lx mainboards are not compatible with matrox g100 or diamond viper v550 video cards. This has to do with the amound of current that these boards can put through the agp port. Alot of older lx chipset boards do not put out enough current through the agp port to run these cards. You could look at any i440bx based board, most of them should work with the v550 fine. You could also take the viper v550 to the place where you got the motherboard from and check to see if it works in another of the same board. If it does work, there may just be a problem with your mainboard, and you should get it replaced. If it will not work, you will need to get a different motherboard to run that video card. Gigabyte, asus, soyo and a few other manufacturers make PII boards in at form factor, take a look around, you should be able to find something.
Collinj

Now, about your board: it has a chipset from an aftermarket vendor. The chipset on your board is "bxcel", im not sure who makes it. This is a bx compatable chipset, but it is not made by intel. You want to stay away from any pII chipsets that are not made by intel, as there are too many problems with these boards. The intel bx chipset uses the "i440bx" name.

Today i bought a Viper V550 and tried to install it in PL297 rev 1.05 with
BIOS 1006 and had the BIOS just beeping One long and three short (AWARD-BIOS). The screen stayed black also. I was running a successfully an ASUS 3DExplorer AGP before (and now again).
OK. so i did the hardware fix proposed from ASUS (and i saw that my power supply has the beauty of 14 A at 3.3 V) -&gt; http://www.asus.com.tw/Products/Techref/Misc/rivatnt-rework.html.
But it didn't help at all. I still have the four beeps (what do they mean ???) and a black screen. So i re-inserted my old 3DExplorer and Bang it runs perfectly.
Now i am very very frustrated (I just spent 200$ on that V550) . I don't
know if my V550 is broken or what.
Any Idea what the problem could be ???

Could be a bad card, but not likely. It sounds like they are just not compatable. I know the older p2l97 board would not run tnt cards due to current, not voltage. The agp port on these boards did not put out enough current, and this was what happened. You could try getting another board and seeing if it works, but It probably wont. Sorry

Problably there are more issues on that
problem than just the low current thing
of the PL297.

In fact i didn't want to spend days and days
trying to find a solution. So i quickly decided to buy a P2B from ASUS today, and
, what do we expect, i goes just smooth.
So fortunately the V550 was not broken.
Thanks anyway for your help.

This is for all the people like me who may be looking for this info, almost two years after the fact. I had the same problem, an old V550 and an old M729 that I wanted to put together for a linux box. Just a black screen at boot. What did I do? Changed out the power supply. I had been using an old 235w ps and I guess it just wasn't giving it enough power, switched to a 250w ps, booted like a charm.